Fusion startup Helion is developing new semiconductors that could double output of its power plants

Helion, a company pursuing fusion-generated electricity, has secured a federal award aimed at improving the electronic hardware at the center of its planned power plants. The company said it will receive $175 million to advance specialized semiconductors and power systems, while a newly disclosed $50 million private investment brings the announced financing connected to the effort to $225 million. Helion is working toward a 2028 commitment to supply Microsoft with electricity from its first plant.

The federal money is intended for research, engineering and production of high-voltage semiconductor equipment and related power electronics. Those devices are central to how Helion moves energy through its fusion machines. The company believes better components could sharply raise the amount of electricity available from a plant, rather than simply making an existing system marginally more efficient.

Helion says the electronic equipment now involved in that process can consume roughly 5% to 10% of the electricity passing through it. In a system with several linked stages, the company argues, those losses can accumulate. Its target is to reduce that loss rate by half. Chief executive and co-founder David Kirtley said the result could be about twice the system’s power output, an estimate that depends on the new equipment performing as intended.

The three-year award comes from the Department of Commerce through the CHIPS Act, the U.S. law designed to strengthen domestic semiconductor research and manufacturing. Helion plans to use part of the funding to establish automated capacity for assembling semiconductor modules, packaging them and testing them. That supply chain is intended to support the fusion equipment under construction as well as later machines.

One new manufacturing line is planned for Washington State. Helion has said the facility would make a category of semiconductor with uses beyond fusion, including industrial production, water treatment, medical applications and defense. The company says such devices are not currently made by U.S. manufacturers, making the proposed line relevant to a wider domestic production push as well as to its energy program.

More than $100 million of the award is earmarked for semiconductor and advanced-packaging research in Washington, according to Kirtley. About $80 million is expected to support work in Vermont on tooling, device design and production processes with GlobalFoundries. The chipmaker has separately received federal support for gallium-nitride semiconductor manufacturing, a material class commonly used in power electronics.

Helion’s technology differs from a fusion design that would use heat to make steam and turn a turbine. Its approach is intended to capture electrical energy directly from the fusion process. Fuel is introduced from either end of an hourglass-shaped chamber, converted into plasma and driven together by magnetic fields. Further magnetic compression raises its temperature above 100 million degrees Celsius; the expanding plasma then transfers energy back through the machine’s magnets and capacitors.

That direct-conversion design makes fast, efficient power electronics especially important to Helion’s commercial case. The company must ultimately show that a plant can generate more power than it consumes, a threshold necessary for a commercially useful fusion station. The potential gains from improved semiconductors therefore matter not only to laboratory performance but also to whether future plants can compete in electricity markets.

There is an important limit to the immediate impact. Kirtley said the research financed by the award will not be incorporated into Orion, Helion’s first plant, before its planned launch because federal contracts can require months of negotiation. The near-term test remains whether Orion can meet the Microsoft timetable. Longer term, the key questions will be whether Helion can build the planned manufacturing capability and turn the component-efficiency work into higher output at later facilities.

Source: TechCrunch